Welcome to the LSST Stars, Milky Way & Local Volume Science Collaboration

These two figures appear in Ivezic et al. arXiv:0805.2366. The left hand panel includes images from Juric et al (2008.) The right hand panel includes images from Juric et al (2008) and Bullock and Johnston (2005).

The Stars, Milky Way and Local Volume Collaboration has the overarching goals of understanding the accretion history and structure of the Milky Way and the Local Volume, and the fundamental properties of stars within 300 pc of the Sun. These are also some of the main science drivers of both the telescope and the survey design of LSST, which will have unprecedented capability in the faint time domain.

Our collaboration is organized into 7 Working Groups, each of which reflects a core scientific area being worked on by collaboration members. All collaboration members belong to at least one Working Group, and in early 2013, each Working Group was charged with creating a brief roadmap that highlights technical and scientific challenges that must be worked through to conduct our science with LSST. These roadmaps have been distilled into a list of active priorities, and the ongoing work tab gives a few examples of action items that collaboration members are actively pursuing.